InformationWeek

DuPont selected Sequoia's XML Portal Server because XML is an open standard. Many of the proprietary and out-of-the-box applications the company uses--as well as applications it's likely to use in the future--produce XML output, Wessely says. Information from one XML-enabled application can be read and manipulated by other XML-enabled applications. This capability lets portal users easily generate specialized reports that haven't previously been created and don't exist in the company's systems, Wessely says. Because XML is a data exchange format designed for presentation in a Web browser, he says, the portal can display output from the company's applications without the need for translation. Many portals are designed to pull critical data automatically and display it on the start pages of key personnel so they have the information the first thing in the morning in order to make strategic decisions.

Virtually any application that runs on a server can be launched directly from a portal start page by including a link to the application. Portals also use programming calls to an application's API, which lets the start page act as the interface to the data so the application that "owns" the data is never actually launched.

Portal software products are server-based and generally use Web technologies such as HTML, XML, and Java to display information in a Web browser. Portal products, however, are focused on the internal needs of a business and are built to keep data secure by limiting or granting access to data only when permission exists. Data access often is restricted by business division, business unit, user group, or individual.

Like many other business applications, portals are poised to enter the wireless age. This year, companies, including DuPont and Sprint PCS, plan to equip their portals to send messages automatically to wireless devices, including the Palm Pilot and other personal digital assistants, text pagers, and digital phones. Executives will be able to view important reports that are posted to the portal when traveling or away from their desktop PCs, or receive automatic notification when such reports are available.

The cost of a portal is determined by what a company wants to do with it. Highly customized portals that integrate numerous applications can cost millions of dollars to implement when software costs and employee time is included. A straightforward implementation of a major vendor's portal that requires little application integration can cost as little as $50,000. A portal based on Lotus

Notes and Domino, when Lotus Notes is already in place, can also be inexpensive, depending on the customization and application integration required.

Companies are devoting more IT resources to portal development and deployment. About a quarter of all software developers that do Internet-related work spend 50% or more of their time working on corporate portals, according to a new survey from Evans Marketing Services in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Forrester Research analyst Joshua Walker warns that vendors offering a quick path to a corporate portal often can't deliver the level of usefulness large companies really need. "Corporations should realize very quickly that a portal is not an out-of-the-box solution," he says. "Building a portal with the level of sophistication companies really want is a long and hard development project."

Delphi Group president Tom Koulopoulos says that as more sophisticated portals are rolled out, they're destined to replace the Windows infrastructure as the desktop of choice for some users. Because of the device-independent nature of a Web browser and HTML, a portal can be used by any employee who requires it, regardless of the platform the employee uses, he says.

"The portal metaphor is going to be the way people work," Koulopoulos says. "The way we work now is too convoluted; even opening your E-mail application or appointments calendar while you're doing something else requires too many separate actions, too many clicks. We open too many applications and search through too many data files and manually pull information together from too many sources. The portal will do that kind of work automatically."

"The portal is a killer application in the sense that it aggregates all the other applications you use in your enterprise and all the important data," says Forrester's Walker. "It's the doorway into everything else. It's really an application and information integration effort, as well as a content management tool. The portal will be the corporate desktop. Definitely."

As recently as a year or two ago, company portals weren't envisioned as fully integrated corporate desktops. For the most part, analysts saw them as tools for searching and presenting information. Still, they predicted portals would become a big market. A November 1998 Merrill Lynch report that predicted a $14.8 billion market by 2002 called corporate portals "the Yahoo of company information." The report foresaw portals as "providing access to business related information in the same way that Internet content portals are the gateway to the wealth of content on the Web."

Predictions of a huge, fast-growing market for company portals created a stampede among vendors. In the past year, more than 100 suppliers began marketing corporate portal products. Vendors such as Corechange, Epicentric, KnowledgeTrack, InfoImage, Plumtree, Sequoia Software, Viador, and others have taken an early lead over bigger rivals, including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun-Netscape, and Sybase, Gartner's Phifer says.

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